Microsoft in talks to buy AI firm Nuance

Microsoft is in talks to buy AI and speech recognition company Nuance Communications. As reported by Bloomberg, last week, the price being discussed is $56 per share, which would value the deal at $16 billion, according to the data by the media house.

Both Nuance and Microsoft have had collaborations for health tech since 2019. Doctors could capture voice form patient visit and prepare electronic medical record. This acquisition could bring in a solid foot in the door for Microsoft in the digital health space.

Microsoft has been aggressively focusing on both AI and acquisitions. After branding itself as mobile first cloud first company, Microsoft is now leveraging artificial intelligence and speech, image recognition technologies to bolster the cloud services. The competition already exists for the tch giant from its peers like Google—with its massive focus on AI via Google Health and Amazon.

Microsoft has been on an acquisition spree for the better half of the decade. If the deal with Nuance does go through, this will be the second largest transaction at $16 billion for the company. The largest deal was with the LinkedIn acquisition at $24 billion in 2016. Microsoft was also reported to have in talks to acquire Discord, a chat app primarily used by the gaming community that later morphed into a Slack-like messaging community app, at $10 billion. Along similar lines Microsoft also acquired Zenimax Mobile for $7.5 billion. Last year, it was in the run up to acquire TikTok, before the deal went to Oracle, which was later shelved this year.